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[Abrams] said Lucas’s treatment had centered on very young characters—teenagers, Lucasfilm told me—which might have struck Disney executives as veering too close for comfort to The Phantom Menace and its 9-year-old Anakin Skywalker and 13-year-old Queen Amidala. “We’ve made some departures” from Lucas’s ideas, Kennedy conceded, but only in “exactly the way you would in any development process.”

I really do not get this. This tells us nothing about Lucas's story ideas for the ST aside form the approximate age of the characters. Also, Rey and Finn are not all that old. Rey looks like she could be 17 or 18.

I also find it amusing that Disney executives are skeptical of TPM when it made over 1 billion in world wide gross. I am not saying that TFA should be like TPM, but the reports of the masses hating the Prequels are greatly exaggerated.

[Abrams] said Lucas’s treatment had centered on very young characters—teenagers, Lucasfilm told me—which might have struck Disney executives as veering too close for comfort to The Phantom Menace and its 9-year-old Anakin Skywalker and 13-year-old Queen Amidala. “We’ve made some departures” from Lucas’s ideas, Kennedy conceded, but only in “exactly the way you would in any development process.”

I really do not get this. This tells us nothing about Lucas's story ideas for the ST aside form the approximate age of the characters. Also, Rey and Finn are not all that old. Rey looks like she could be 17 or 18.

I also find it amusing that Disney executives are skeptical of TPM when it made over 1 billion in world wide gross. I am not saying that TFA should be like TPM, but the reports of the masses hating the Prequels are greatly exaggerated.

It wouldn't be a bad idea to have had a spin off or television series which dealt with the new characters of the Skywalker lineage while they were children. There could have been characters from the New Jedi Order series, but I don't think there is going to be more than probably ten Jedi in Episode VII.

I'm still pissed that there never was an animated series between Episode I and II with Anakin as a child and Obi-Wan training him then. We could use some younger characters in the series to follow after.

I am a bit concerned if Abrams has dismissed Lucas' original plans for the trilogy - not because I think that Lucas should be the man to write the story (although he is very good at writing story treatments and some of the characters are character he invented) but because I remember what he did to the Star Trek films where he basically ignored everything that happened before and some of the characters were by some reason totally different. However, I am hoping Abrams affection for the Star Wars films (at least the original) means that won't happen here and that he will not ignore things that happened in the previous six films.

As for the family theme I think the trailer is very clear that the person Luke is talking to is a family member. It doesn't have to be his/Leia's daughter/son but it is likely. It could actually be their nieces/cousins (the children of Padmé's siblings for example) but I don't think such originality has entered their minds and therefore I think these are Luke and Leia's children (at least 1 or 2 of them) and I am hoping it is/they are Luke's children as I have always seen him as the main hero of the saga (let's face it, Leia was probably not meant to be his sister until in the 1980's).

Finally, I hope we will one day get to read Lucas' original plan for the films as I think it would be an interesting read even though the films will go in a different direction.

Maybe Kylo is the 'grandchild' and the person Luke is supposedly talking to is someone not related? That would be an inverse of what happened before, where instead of a non-relative (Obi-wan) mentoring a Skywalker, a Skywalker is mentoring someone non-related. And this Sith grandchild is the last of the Skywalkers, who has to be taken down by this new person Luke is talking to (someone who isn't as emotionally involved to whatever evil this grandchild did) because if he does it himself, he fears he'll risk falling to the Darkside.